Monday, March 1, 2010

Pierre Morel's new "Make as much money for Lionsgate that I did for Fox" vehicle is dull as dirt and about as Parisian as the defunct Alabama-based Department store chain with the same name.

The film opens with a Cadillac Escalade driving through the streets of Paris, which is reminiscent of the _Sopranos_ opening credits, now if you can't really picture Tony Soprano driving through Paris then maybe you're starting to get what's wrong with this movie. The driver of the car, Johnathon Rhys-Meyers, plays a young special agent in training who covers his true mission- changing License plates in the underground garage of the American Embassy in Paris. And can I just say as a side note that there is an underground garage at the American Embassy in Paris like there is a veranda with a large gas grill built into flagstone and a swimming pool outside my ghetto apartment. This movie ignores an important aspect to Paris, most of it was built before automobiles existed.

John Travolta, the very good father and very closeted homo, gets into fighting shape (meaning the costume designers dress him in baggy pants a leather jacket to hide his fat midsection and the DP rarely shoots standing up) to play an expert "Special Operatives Agent" or some position like that. Now I'm not looking up exactly what his position was because the writers of this movie did SO LITTLE WORK in creating the story, why should I even bother? John Travolta performs the saddest imitation of his Pulp Fiction persona since Mae West's imitation of her former sex pot persona in "Sextette." And JRM's performance is so limited, especially vis-a-vis his other acting roles, it's as if Conrad Hall had to shoot a movie with a Fisher-Price PixelVision camera.